Memory

Amnesia is a common conceit of Puzzlebox characters. Sometimes, this is mere laziness on the player's part, an excuse to avoid confronting a character's background in detail. Sometimes, though, it's a meaningful reflection of the core themes of Puzzlebox: rebirth, identity, ephemerality, language... What does it mean to be "blanked out" in a world that consists of nothing but information?

A society, too, can have its own form of amnesia. The history of the Mess is hazy and irrecoverably incomplete. In large part, this is because most of the Mess's residents immigrated from other parts of the Puzzlebox. There is excellent evidence that the Mess was actually created with fictional evidence of a past, and even its natives were instantiated in mid-activity with false memories of a heritage. Of course, this leads to distressing questions about when, precisely, this arbitrary starting point was, or is, or will be...

Top is alone among the Warps in making a serious, lucid, scholarly discipline of history. Toppish scholars rigorously and passionately chronicle even minor events, and lavish volume after volume upon major ones.

Bottom relies instead upon oral history. Stories change radically in the telling, but since they invariably seem to improve over time, it could be argued that this is not such a bad thing.

Up also keeps voluminous records of daily happenings, but these are not so much "history" as they are "statistics." Efforts are rarely made to condense these reports into any form of narrative more evocative than the pie chart.

Down does actually have some respect for history. In the august tradition of [Amyl Nitrate], a few Downers have made heroic efforts to enscribe something lasting and fixed within the chronic decay of their home. Their efforts invariably fail, as books crumble to dust and files degrade to bit-garbage, but they at least deserve credit for trying -- and even more for bringing the Punk DIY aesthetic to historiography.

Charm seems to follow the lead of its Monarch and does not dwell on the miseries of the past.

Strange is claimed by its inhabitants to contain a complete and comprehensive history of the Mess within its Library. The known samples of this work have been slanderous, self-referential, cryptically allusive to the point of incoherence, and/or distinctly obscene, though they present a distinct poetic genius to those who can stomach more than a few stanzas.